I don’t watch TV anymore. I don’t enjoy being told what to watch or when to watch it. I haven’t watched broadcast television for about five years.
YouTube is my media drug of choice, but vanilla YouTube is riddled with cancerous adverts, which I loathe.
On Windows, using Chrome, Edge or Firefox, I can install the superb ‘Enhancer for YouTube’ extension which kills all of the adverts and lets me tweak settings the improve my YouTube experience. One of my favourites is to enable a feature that controls the volume of a video by scrolling the mouse wheel. Invaluable.
My MacBook Pro browser is Safari, which I use because it integrates so well with Mac OS and iOS. Safari isn’t supported by the Enhancer extension though, so watching YouTube on Safari is no fun.
Interestingly, no YouTube app exists for Mac OS, and the App Store doesn’t let me install the iOS version, even on this Apple Silicon M1Pro. Annoying.
In Windows, I use Edge, so I installed the Edge browser on my Mac, but just for YouTube. An upside to doing this is that all of my bookmarks are synchronised to the Mac, which is useful at times.
I don’t want to run Edge up every time I watch YouTube, though, and in a perfect world, I would have a YouTube app, that runs on Mac OS Monterey, that also allows me to install Enhancer for YouTube. Oh yes, and I don’t want to pay for YouTube to go advert free. I mean, who does that?1
So that’s what I did. I used Web Catalog with their pre-rolled YouTube settings to set up a YouTube app. In the Web Catalog settings I told it to add an Edge extension and installed Enhancer for YouTube. I then logged into my YouTube account, and now I have an icon on the dock that does exactly what I wanted it to.
I also set up BBC Sounds in the same way to make listening to BBC Radio 6Music easier, and to allow the radio to keep playing if I quit the Safari browser. Win.
1 It turns out that I do that. We have a new Smart TV that uses Google TV OS. The YouTube ads bypassed the Pi-Hole, and I subscribed to YouTube Premium to see what it’s like. A year later, I’m still subscribed, although I still use the web catalog app on my Mac.